Gabe Newell: Linux is the future of gaming, new hardware coming soon

Valve chief blasts PC market, promises big news is coming next week.

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and managing director of Valve, said today that Linux is the future of gaming despite its current minuscule share of the market.

That seems hard to believe, given that Newell acknowledged Linux gaming generally accounts for less than one percent of the market by any measure including players, player minutes, and revenue. But Valve is going to do its best to make sure Linux becomes the future of gaming by extending its Steam distribution platform to hardware designed for living rooms.

Newell made his comments while delivering a keynote at LinuxCon in New Orleans. "It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming," Newell said. "It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope."

Valve brought Steam to Linux in February, and the platform now has 198 games. Newell has previously promised to unveil a Linux-based "Steam box" to compete against living room gaming consoles sometime this year, and his company has updated the Steam software to work better on TVs. While he didn't specifically mention the Steam box today, Newell hinted at an announcement next week.

"Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," Newell said.

Getting games to work on Linux has its challenges. If not implemented right, "Just compile it yourself" could be the inconvenient solution to the problem of installing games and applying updates, he said. However, Valve worked through these problems in bringing Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux, hopefully showing the way to other developers, he said.

Bringing Steam to Linux "was a signal for our development partners that we really were serious about this Linux thing we were talking about," Newell said.

Besides just releasing Steam on Linux-based operating systems, Valve is contributing to the LLDB debugger project and is co-developing an additional debugger for Linux, Newell said.

"When we talk to developers and say, 'if you can pick one thing for Valve to work on the tools side to make Linux a better development target,' they always say we should build a debugger," he said.

Newell has previously complained about Windows 8 being a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space," and he reiterated these concerns today. Closed platforms are going to lose to open ones that allow innovation, he said. But that won't stop Steam's rise: Despite year-over-year declines in the PC market, Steam has seen a 76 percent increase in its own sales according to Newell.

"I think we'll see either significant restructuring or market exits by top five PC players. It's looking pretty grim," he said. "Systems which are innovation-friendly and embrace openness are going to have a greater competitive advantage to closed or tightly regulated systems."

The biggest thing for me at this point is my backlog of Windows titles. If were to integrate Wine in such a way that games unlikely to ever see a direct Linux port (i.e. older titles) could be installed and run transparently via Steam, I'd probably move over pretty quickly as that's really the only thing keeping me on Windows at this point.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

198 games is "only a handful"?

You must have extremely large hands. Do you use a tablet as a phone?

And why use a Bay Trail CPU to beat a PS4/XB1 when you can get a similar AMD APU (with or without the graphics card) for the same price and performance?

The number of games is less relevant than the number of quality games. 200 indie games that won't spark much interest outside of a small group is less useful than 10 big budget games that will drive the numbers needed to increase adoption.

The biggest thing for me at this point is my backlog of Windows titles. If were to integrate Wine in such a way that games unlikely to ever see a direct Linux port (i.e. older titles) could be installed and run transparently via Steam, I'd probably move over pretty quickly as that's really the only thing keeping me on Windows at this point.

Newell has previously complained about Windows 8 being a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space," and he reiterated these concerns today. Closed platforms are going to lose to open ones that allow innovation, he said. But that won't stop Steam's rise: Despite year-over-year declines in the PC market, Steam has seen a 76 percent increase in its own sales according to Newell.

For a catastrophe, Steam sure is running well under Windows 8 for me. I guess it's not that closed after all, huh, Gabe.

"I think we'll see either significant restructuring or market exits by top five PC players. It's looking pretty grim," he said. "Systems which are innovation-friendly and embrace openness are going to have a greater competitive advantage to closed or tightly regulated systems."

Is he saying that Windows is doomed, or desktop computers are doomed? If he's saying the first one, then why is he talking about hardware? But if he's saying the second one, then what sort of machine does he envision people will play on? Closed hardware like an Xbox?

Gabe, if you want this to take off, just release Half-Life 3 as a Linux-exclusive

That wouldn't do anything for other publishers making their games work, which is the real problem. Valve can release all of their stuff working on linux, but until a majority of publishers do it won't take off. If 90% of the games don't work people won't use it.

"I think we'll see either significant restructuring or market exits by top five PC players. It's looking pretty grim," he said. "Systems which are innovation-friendly and embrace openness are going to have a greater competitive advantage to closed or tightly regulated systems."

Is he saying that Windows is doomed, or desktop computers are doomed? If he's saying the first one, then why is he talking about hardware? But if he's saying the second one, then what sort of machine does he envision people will play on? Closed hardware like an Xbox?

Newell has previously complained about Windows 8 being a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space," and he reiterated these concerns today. Closed platforms are going to lose to open ones that allow innovation, he said. But that won't stop Steam's rise: Despite year-over-year declines in the PC market, Steam has seen a 76 percent increase in its own sales according to Newell.

For a catastrophe, Steam sure is running well under Windows 8 for me. I guess it's not that closed after all, huh, Gabe.

Ditto here. Been running it with Windows 8 and 8.1 and the games sure love it.

Newell has previously complained about Windows 8 being a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space," and he reiterated these concerns today. Closed platforms are going to lose to open ones that allow innovation, he said. But that won't stop Steam's rise: Despite year-over-year declines in the PC market, Steam has seen a 76 percent increase in its own sales according to Newell.

For a catastrophe, Steam sure is running well under Windows 8 for me. I guess it's not that closed after all, huh, Gabe.

I believe it's also the fastest growing OS on Steam's hardware survey - possibly even faster then when Windows 7 was released, but don't quote me on that last bit.

Newell has previously complained about Windows 8 being a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space," and he reiterated these concerns today. Closed platforms are going to lose to open ones that allow innovation, he said. But that won't stop Steam's rise: Despite year-over-year declines in the PC market, Steam has seen a 76 percent increase in its own sales according to Newell.

For a catastrophe, Steam sure is running well under Windows 8 for me. I guess it's not that closed after all, huh, Gabe.

Yes because it is obvious what he meant is that Steam doesn't run on Windows 8.

He's been saying this for a couple of years now. I used to think it's bogus. But then this is the guy who predicted that online content delivery would replace the shiny spinning Edison mechanical devices. Gabe and Valve got in on it at the ground level. Look at them now. Multi billion dollar company owning a defacto standard for game content delivery?

As more consumer oriented tech is implemented in mainstream OSs, and as more and more they get locked down with app stores and no admin rights, and requiring signed executables, and last but not the least the secure boot initiative, the more gamers who build their own gaming systems will install an alternative OS without these limitations. It could happen. Or not. That really depends on whether we can keep Windows (and OS X?) as-is with admin rights and ability to run any exe and install drivers willy-nilly. Those same qualities which are essential to a gaming PC, are a murder in the consumer market. That's how users fuck up their computers. That's why Apple has all but taken that away, and consumers love them for it.

Gabe could be right. Or not. Whether or not Linux becomes the mainstay OS of gaming is entirely up to Microsoft and what they choose to do to Windows. I guess we'll wait and see.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

Linux has a dynamite upcoming schedule, which is basically every kickstarter game that is also going on PC. Shadowrun Returns (DLC), Planetary Annihilation, Project Eternity, Wasteland 2, etc. I really think that even if steam introduces unimpressive hardware it'll have a surprisingly strong line of "exclusives."

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

Linux has a dynamite upcoming schedule, which is basically every kickstarter game that is also going on PC. Shadowrun Returns (DLC), Planetary Annihilation, Project Eternity, Wasteland 2, etc. I really think that even if steam introduces unimpressive hardware it'll have a surprisingly strong line of "exclusives."

But they're not exclusive to Linux, so that's hardly going to make Windows users delete the OS that came with their PC.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

198 games is "only a handful"?

You must have extremely large hands. Do you use a tablet as a phone?

And why use a Bay Trail CPU to beat a PS4/XB1 when you can get a similar AMD APU (with or without the graphics card) for the same price and performance?

The number of games is less relevant than the number of quality games. 200 indie games that won't spark much interest outside of a small group is less useful than 10 big budget games that will drive the numbers needed to increase adoption.

Just don't see it.... Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, Chrome, Xbox One, PS4, WiiU, DS. With all those platforms, he chooses Linux as the future of gaming?

Laughable.

What does the "future" of gaming even mean? More people are playing games on their phones and tablets than on PCs right now. Yes, there are simplistic in comparison but things change quickly on the tech front.

Can I walk into a Best Buy or Staples or Wal-Mart and buy a machine running Linux? No? When I can perhaps I can take his comments seriously.

He's been saying this for a couple of years now. I used to think it's bogus. But then this is the guy who predicted that online content delivery would replace the shiny spinning Edison mechanical devices. Gabe and Valve got in on it at the ground level. Look at them now. Multi billion dollar company owning a defacto standard for game content delivery?

As more consumer oriented tech is implemented in mainstream OSs, and as more and more they get locked down with app stores and no admin rights, and requiring signed executables, and last but not the least the secure boot initiative, the more gamers who build their own gaming systems will install an alternative OS without these limitations. It could happen. Or not. That really depends on whether we can keep Windows (and OS X?) as-is with admin rights and ability to run any exe and install drivers willy-nilly. Those same qualities which are essential to a gaming PC, are a murder in the consumer market. That's how users fuck up their computers. That's why Apple has all but taken that away, and consumers love them for it.

Gabe could be right. Or not. Whether or not Linux becomes the mainstay OS of gaming is entirely up to Microsoft and what they choose to do to Windows. I guess we'll wait and see.

The questions I see that will prevent Linux from being THE SOLUTION are the following:

1) Will the traditional Linux user, who uses Linux because of the vast amount of free software options, pay for software on Linux.

2) Will Linux get to a point where it will just work, I have used Ubuntu, its still not at that point.

3) Will developers other then Valve get on board. EA isn't onboard and Battlefield is pretty good franchise.

In the end the year of Linux has been ever year since the dawn of Windows.

I don't know why anyone takes this guy serious, he keeps bashing windows 8 time after time but the stats from his own company shows that the average gamer prefers Windows 8 to linux ! Windows 8 has become the second most used OS on Steam, far outperforming his much loved Linux !

This is a guy who founded a company that sells games through the appstore model , but somehow he hates it that Microsoft is doing same on their own platform.

One aspect of being closed that he is talking about was the D3D 9 to D3D 10 problem a lot of developers faced because D3D10 was only supported in Vista and up.

If developers did not want to lose out on the huge chunk of customers running XP then they had to stick with a D3D 9 renderer and lose out on the new functionality and convenience of D3D 10 (or add a bunch of extra work making two renderers).

OpenGL 3 and 4 supporting the new hardware features on Windows XP shows it did not have to be that way.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

Those rumored steam boxes or loving room pc's that were quick denied after price came out weren't $3-400 they were triple to quadruple that. The average person won't spend $1000+ on a high end rig they want to spend $500 which is right about where the big console fight is price wise.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

Linux has a dynamite upcoming schedule, which is basically every kickstarter game that is also going on PC. Shadowrun Returns (DLC), Planetary Annihilation, Project Eternity, Wasteland 2, etc. I really think that even if steam introduces unimpressive hardware it'll have a surprisingly strong line of "exclusives."

None of those could remotely be considered "exclusives." Especially when Linux support was only added as a stretch goal for all of those projects. If those stretch goals were never reached, they would be launching on Windows only; which shows that it's still the premiere platform for developing and selling games on.

I was more excited about the headline before i read that Gabe said that on LinuxCon. That is more a try at getting the crowd there into a positive mood than an announcement of a paradigm change on Valve's side.

Gabe, if you want this to take off, just release Half-Life 3 as a Linux-exclusive

That wouldn't do anything for other publishers making their games work, which is the real problem. Valve can release all of their stuff working on linux, but until a majority of publishers do it won't take off. If 90% of the games don't work people won't use it.

Any mention of Half-Life 3 is, obviously, a joke...

But the fact is that developers will go where the market is. And a HL3-exclusive would leave a couple of million gamers sitting with their new Steam-on-Linux platform looking for something else to play once they're finished.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

198 games is "only a handful"?

You must have extremely large hands. Do you use a tablet as a phone?

And why use a Bay Trail CPU to beat a PS4/XB1 when you can get a similar AMD APU (with or without the graphics card) for the same price and performance?

Look at the titles. Those aren't the big titles that most gamers want to play. As Marshall McLuhan suggested: the content is the audience.

The Wii sold almost strictly because of its content: 1st Party Nintendo titles. The only game series that sold well on the Wii was Just Dance... but aside from that most of the 3rd party titles did relatively poorly. Valve doesn't have many titles that it could dangle as Linux-only exclusive content for a Steam Box (they could do it with sequels to Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike and Team Fortress... but they'd probably lose a lot of money because of lost PC and console sales).

If you don't have titles like GTA and Call of Duty (e.g.: the Triple A titles which sells bazillions of copies), your platform isn't going to get very far.

I don't know why anyone takes this guy serious, he keeps bashing windows 8 time after time but the stats from his own company shows that the average gamer prefers Windows 8 to linux !

Gee, most games only run on Windows and Windows 8 is shipping on all new hardware! Go figure!

Quote:

This is a guy who founded a company that sells games through the appstore model , but somehow he hates it that Microsoft is doing same on their own platform.

Steam isn't integrated into the OS. On top of that, Microsoft has made them the exclusive source for applications using the WinRT API and Modern environment. What happens if access to the next revision of DirectX is restricted in a similar fashion?

I don't know why anyone takes this guy serious, he keeps bashing windows 8 time after time but the stats from his own company shows that the average gamer prefers Windows 8 to linux ! Windows 8 has become the second most used OS, far outperforming his much loved Linux !

This is a guy who founded a company that sells games through the appstore model , but somehow he hates it that Microsoft is doing same on their own platform.

Don't get me wrong I love Steam, but People are overseeing the obvious he isn't happy that Microsoft is coming to the game that he and Apple have been playing for years. They are trying to cut out the middle man and that's where Valve lies. Given he also can be genuinely upset that Windows 8 had so much of the backwards compatibility portions of it stripped out making sales of older titles harder for new PCs unless the dev patches it to work on Windows 8.

Gabe, if you want this to take off, just release Half-Life 3 as a Linux-exclusive

That wouldn't do anything for other publishers making their games work, which is the real problem. Valve can release all of their stuff working on linux, but until a majority of publishers do it won't take off. If 90% of the games don't work people won't use it.

Any mention of Half-Life 3 is, obviously, a joke...

But the fact is that developers will go where the market is. And a HL3-exclusive would leave a couple of million gamers sitting with their new Steam-on-Linux platform looking for something else to play once they're finished.

I guess it's a chicken/egg situation. Would enough games switch to linux for one game, even a hypothetical one, if no one else was there? Personally I think people would just skip that game.

It shouldn't be hard to use Bay Trail paired with a powerful GPU to match the PS4/XB1 in terms of price/performance but use Linux instead.

The question is if anyone will buy a $300 to $400 console with only a handful of games; see Wii U as an example.

Linux has a dynamite upcoming schedule, which is basically every kickstarter game that is also going on PC. Shadowrun Returns (DLC), Planetary Annihilation, Project Eternity, Wasteland 2, etc. I really think that even if steam introduces unimpressive hardware it'll have a surprisingly strong line of "exclusives."

But they're not exclusive to Linux, so that's hardly going to make Windows users delete the OS that came with their PC.

This is targeting console owners. Linux has gotten the quick traction it can get on PC right now, most of it coming from indies and kickstarter. Something with the ease of use that a console offers, hundreds of exclusives, and a comparable price point would make a formidable offer. If they can get a few million people on the box, they can probably get much better UE4 support, and that would dramatically affect the AAA problem linux has.

1) Will the traditional Linux user, who uses Linux because of the vast amount of free software options, pay for software on Linux.

2) Will Linux get to a point where it will just work, I have used Ubuntu, its still not at that point.

3) Will developers other then Valve get on board. EA isn't onboard and Battlefield is pretty good franchise.

1. Yes, the Humble Bundle and steam has consistently shown that they will. I use Linux for my fiancee's computers not because it is free, but because it is easy to install, fairly secure, and has a very low resource load. Also, this would not be targeted at the "traditional Linux user." It's trying to expand the install base.

2. It really does. In arcane hardware situations it works even better than Windows.

3. That depends on how many people they can attract. Kickstarter and Humble Bundle means that there's already a load of, if not most, indies on board Linux. Now it's time to go after the big fish.